Canada's New Banknotes Strike Some as Loonie

Melting Bills, Maple Leaf Fuel Uproar; 'There Are Always Nit-Pickers'

TORONTO—When Nicholos Billard's employer at an Ontario construction company gave him eight newly printed Canadian $100 bills as a Christmas bonus in 2011, he tossed them in an empty coffee can.

The next morning, they were shriveled—by the heat of a nearby radiator, says his mother, who made local headlines when she tried to get the bills replaced.

Canada's central bank has been rolling out plastic bills since 2011. But some users are complaining that the bills are sticky, don't work in all vending machine, and can even melt. WSJ's Karen Johnson reports from Toronto.

Canada started rolling out new, polymer-based $100 bills two years ago, followed by 50s and then, last November, 20s. The money—slick like a sheet of plastic, hard to fold and partly transparent—is more difficult to counterfeit than Canada's old paper-and-cotton bills. Australia and New Zealand have used similar, plasticized notes for years. The U.S. has no plans to introduce them.

They've been a hard sell here so far, forcing the central bank to defend them against a growing list of allegations: They don't work in vending machines; they clump together; they melt.

"I avoid getting those bills if I can," says Mr. Billard's mother, Mona. While the serial numbers on her son's bills were still legible, several banks refused to replace them, she said. Finally, last summer, the Bank of Canada, the central bank, exchanged them.

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Nicholos Billard's $100 bills after they melted when left near a radiator.
Mona Billard

The $100 note has been dogged by other controversy. Its overall design theme is Canadian medical innovation. An early prototype of the bill bore an image of a woman with South Asian features peering through a microscope.

Months later, when the actual $100 note was released, the scientist no longer appeared South Asian, but Caucasian, triggering a flood of complaints. The central bank, which designed the money, explained that the artist tried to remove identifiable facial features on the final bill. Still, Bank of Canada Gov. Mark Carney issued an apology, admitting the image "appears to represent only one ethnic group."

A more common complaint for all three denominations of the new notes: The plastic bills tend to stick together. Canadian Jeremy Taggart, drummer for alternative-rock band Our Lady Peace, complained in a recent tweet about the currency after accidentally handing a cashier three clingy, new $20 bills when he meant to hand over just one.

"They are sticky, and thin, and annoying," Mr. Taggart says. The bank has said all new bills tend to stick together at first because of how tightly they are packaged, and that the problem will fade.

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And then there's the maple-leaf controversy.

After Sean Blaney, a botanist in New Brunswick, heard a news report last month about Canada's new $20 bills causing headaches for vending machine operators, he voiced his own complaint.

The maple leaf depicted on the bills isn't an indigenous Canadian maple at all, but a nonnative and invasive Norway maple, he claimed in an email exchange with the Bank of Canada.

"It's sad that we've got such an un-Canadian image on our $20 bill," he wrote.

The leaf appears on the new $20, $50 and $100 notes. (The Canadian dollar is currently worth a U.S. dollar.) But the leaf design sports five main lobes, instead of the three lobes of the Canadian sugar maple, the type depicted on the Canadian flag.

The hardy Norway maple is actually the most common in eastern Canadian cities. But Mr. Blaney, assistant director at the nonprofit Atlantic Canada Conservation Data Center, says a native Canadian variety deserves to be on the note instead.

"You wouldn't choose to put a palm tree on the bill," he says.

The Bank of Canada says the leaf design isn't a Norway maple leaf at all, but, rather, a composite that "contains different aspects of various Canadian species of maple trees." A spokeswoman said the bank is standing behind its leaf design, which will also appear on the $5 and $10 bills when they are rolled out later this year.

Currency experts say griping is typical when new money is issued.

"There are always nit-pickers," says Owen W. Linzmayer, publisher in San Francisco of BanknoteNews.com and editor of the Banknote Book, a catalog for collectors of world notes.

Similar currency crises have roiled other countries. The Bermuda monetary authority revised its $50 banknote last summer, replacing the nonindigenous red-billed tropicbird depicted on the note with the indigenous white-tailed tropicbird.

The Philippines central bank has been defending its bank notes since 2009. An artist drew the Philippines map incorrectly on several denominations of its peso bills. And on the 500-peso notes, designers gave the island's famous blue-naped parrot a yellow beak, instead of the red beak that Mother Nature gave it.

The Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas, the country's central bank, has no plans for a reprint. A map of the archipelago nation "cannot be expected to reflect all of our islands and the precise coordinates of each site," the bank says in a statement on its website. And, it adds, specialized banknote printers have limited color capacity, which affected the bird's coloring.

Bank of Canada spokeswoman Julie Girard said the central bank isn't considering recalling any of its new polymer notes. She said the bank had laid the groundwork for the changeover years ago, focusing in particular on the country's cash-handling industries.

Still, about half the members of the Canadian Automatic Merchandising Association, a vending-machine industry group, say their machines can't handle the new $20 notes. Arie Koifman, the association's president, said many members are waiting to upgrade machines until the $10 and $5 notes are released.

Worry over the money heated up over the summer, after Canadian media reported several instances of the new bills' melting. Apart from Mr. Billard's melting bonus, a bank teller in British Columbia made national news after she told a local radio station of seeing bills that had melted a on car dashboard on a hot summer day.

The central bank says that as of Nov. 8 it had replaced at least 315 of the new notes because of damage. The bank's Ms. Girard declined to comment on any specific cases, including Ms. Billard's, except to say there was "no validity to reports that the notes melted in vehicles."

The bills' polymer material was exposed to temperatures as high as 284 degrees Fahrenheit and as low as minus-103 degrees in the central bank's laboratories and in a series of independent labs, according to Martine Warren, chemist and scientific adviser at the Bank of Canada. The bank declined to comment on the notes' exact melting point, but discourages people from experimenting.

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